Back in the 1960s the IBM 1401 was both state of the art and an engineering marvel. It filled up an entire room and weighed thousands of pounds; in today’s money it would cost about $1.5 million. The old 1401 could perform just over 4,000 calculations per second and at the time was virtually unmatched. Nowadays, the average mobile phone has a microchip about the size of your fingernail and can perform about 1 billion calculations per second.

Here are a few examples of famous predictions about computers that will surely go down in history.

• Thomas Watson of IBM stated in 1943 that he believed there was a world market for maybe five computers
• Popular Mechanics stated that in the future computers may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.
• An engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip asked "But what...is it good for?"
• Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer stated "So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you because we just want to do it. Pay our salary and we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'"
• Ken Olson, President of Digital Equipment Corp, in 1977 stated that there is no need for any individual to have a computer in their home.

The exponential growth of computing power is utterly astonishing and will profoundly reshape all of human civilization. The most spectacular thing about it is the fact that our generation is smack dab in the middle of all of these transitions. By the year 2020, a chip with today’s processing power will cost about a penny, which is the cost of scrap paper we throw in the garbage. Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries—cell phone, Internet—that we all seem to take for granted. Our world is already much, much smarter than 10 years ago and as computing power doubles every 18 months, it’s propelling us towards a radically different future. 

Engineers are already designing driverless cars that rely on Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and laser sensors to avoid obstacles autonomously. Some driverless car concepts (which are functional to an extent) achieve these feats with the power of about 8-10 ordinary desktop computers. I actually had a chance to ride in one of these autonomous vehicles in North Carolina while filming with the BBC.  

Similarly, in the not too distant future, our streets and highways will contain embedded computer chips that manage traffic, turning what once seemed a futuristic fantasy into reality. (If you’ve ever seen the movie "Minority Report," set in the year 2054, you'll remember the cars that simply drove themselves, allowing Tom Cruise to multitask without having to watch the road.) All the vehicles on the road will essentially speak with one another, and I believe that in the future, the words "traffic accident" and "traffic jam" will simply disappear from the English language.